[Closed] Fibre Broadband

Been with BT for years, customer service has been excellent. Technical support is average to poor though, whether this is important to you depends how handy you are at fixing your own problems. My Mother is with virgin broadband and they have been good to deal with.

I was with Orange and they were properly awful; so much so I got 12 months free BB after a particular 'incident'

Went to BT Infinity. Great stable connection, flicking fast and no issues.

Got £50 cashback and a £25 Sainbury's voucher as well.

Our street cant get due to the shit wiring method that BT used when the house was built. Openzone say its too expensive to change/upgrade.

Meh!

if you want reliability and customer service then zen are hard to beat.

not cheap though.

I'm a BT business customer [we have 5000 ish lines], customer service is OK.
Indian call centre which I struggle to understand sometimes and they do what a lot of call centres do if something deviates from what they are expecting - start reading from a script, regardless of whether or not it's relevant to the problem.
You can't make them hurry up on anything either, they give you a date and - on the whole - they do it that date, I've tried a few times to expedite things and I don't ever recall being successful

I second Zen. I reluctantly moved away from them to BT due to price. That said, I've had no need to test BT's customer service because their broadband has - touch wood - worked absolutely fine.

Been on Virgin for a couple of years now. Very fast (100Mb now), very few issues and nothing that has bothered me for long. I don't work from home anymore but would happily on Virgin. No idea how it compares price wise, or if you can even get it since it's not on your list.

I second Zen. I reluctantly moved away from them to BT due to price.

i nearly did, and then they lopped 30% off my bill to keep me.

No virgin unfortunately! Good to hear better things about BT, pity they always have multiple choice and hard to get hold of staff IMHO. Willing to give them another go though. Awaiting call back from orange/ee just been informed that new customers get a better deal than existing - kind of dumb eh!

jam bo, they did offer some incentives to stay but it still wasn't enough to be competitive with BT

I just switched from sky to plusnet £9.99 for 6 monhs then £19.99. They might all be unlimited but I wouldn't count on some of those companies not throttling your speeds down at peak times

i nearly did, and then they lopped 30% off my bill to keep me.

Interesting, I'm with Zen but I can get cheaper elsewhere. Might try the moving option.

well doubled my package to 200gb for £1.20ish more.

should be enough for the kids gaming 😯

OK - Spoke to Plusnet and they seem a thoroughly decent bunch. Owned by BT as well, yet much cheaper.

Zen have outstanding tech support, as do EasyNet.

But I'm commenting from a 'business' perspective.

IIRC we pay about £4k/annum for our SureStream connection. Only had 3 minutes of downtime in 18 months - only 'cos they sent an Engineer to upgrade our router they supply.

Looking into Fibre at the moment - probably cost aound £7k for 100Mb.

OK i'm not very techy, but if it is already fibre-optic to the box in the street,as BT have been upgrading, and BT don't put fibreoptic to your house (as they told me) then how can your broadband speed increase by taking out their "infinity" package?
Genuine question.

no idea - it's still 2 tiny weenie bits of copper to the house, probably from 1950 😉

Apparently if it was fibre all the way it'd be 300-400mb into the house

It's your connection from house to the exchange which is measured, not house to cabinet.

But cabinet to exchange is fibre-optic already, so why are we paying extra for "infinity" package?

Zen - phone tech support, and a cheerful knowledgable UK based tech picks up the phone in two rings, listens and gives advice appropriate to your knowledge level without reading from a script.

At least they did when I was with them. Bloody fantastic 🙂

But cabinet to exchange is fibre-optic already, so why are we paying extra for "infinity" package?

I know with Virgin they run BNC cable into the house so I would assume that BT will do the same. This goes back to conversion points locally and even back to the local street box in copper which then turns it to fibre.

The speed increases will simply be changes on their switch gear. My parents went from 10Mb to 60Mb to 100Mb to 120Mb and it's all just switch changes made at the exchange.

IIRC not all cabinets are fibre - hence BT is going round digging up roads.

Until there is fibre available at a cabinet local to you (they might be installing new cabs, then transferring lines over one-by-one)

The cabinet in my street is fibre, BT told me that, they also told me they do not renew wire to the house, so the service is already in use, so how do they increase speed when you pay more? do they just "turn it up" at their end? ha ha!?

we have shitty aluminium wiring direct from exchange. There is a fibre cabinet 200m from my home but dont go via that. 👿

I get 1.1Mbps

The cabinet in my street is fibre, BT told me that, they also told me they do not renew wire to the house, so the service is already in use, so how do they increase speed when you pay more? do they just "turn it up" at their end? ha ha!?

Yep.

Just been on to BT to cancel bb and phone package with them to move away. Young lady then offers Bt Infinity option 2 totally unlimited (upto 78meg) evening and weekend calls plus bt tv for £20 pm. we currently have 4 meg max heard alot of bad things about talktalk but also lots of good things depends on who you get. BT have loads of offers at the mo the package we were offered is £26 pm online give them a ring and haggle.